


Predstavlenie

by MoreThanSlightly (cadignan)



Series: Transitive [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Polyamory, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 17:47:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2318018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadignan/pseuds/MoreThanSlightly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She already knows what it is he is asking. How did you put yourself back together? How did you become a person again after being a weapon? She puts the book on the coffee table and says, “Predstavlenie.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Predstavlenie

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place a few months after the first chapter of "Transitive."

“How did you do it?” he asks Natasha, one afternoon when they are alone.

She’s curled up on the opposite end of the couch with a book resting on her knees. She eyes him over the top edge of the pages. Her eyes are grey-green, light in comparison to the dark green leather of the book cover. Natasha reads everything: mission reports, magazines, Twitter, old books with tiny print on thin fluttering pages like the one in her hands now. He thinks it’s in French. He could read French, once, maybe. He has never been able to read Natasha.

But she does not ask him ‘how did I do what.’ She already knows what it is he is asking. How did you put yourself back together? How did you become a person again after being a weapon? She puts the book on the coffee table and says, “ _Predstavlenie_.”

All that reading has given her a hell of a vocabulary. He is forced to ask what the word means.

“You act like the person you want to be. It does not matter what you feel. You perfect the outside.”

“That’s not what Sam told me to do,” he says. Sam said _cry if you need to cry_. Sam said _sometimes you need to let that shit out_. But he doesn’t. He can’t. Except maybe here, with Natasha. These conversations in Russian feel so much safer than the English conversations. Fewer people can listen to them. If he can’t find a way to say something, he can pretend the problem is the language, rather than him.

“You asked me what I did,” she says, with a shrug. “I didn’t say it was healthy.”

“So you perfected the outside,” he says. “You treated your whole life like a performance.”

She tilts her head and her hair falls forward. Even in the weak sunlight of this grey afternoon, her hair gleams red-gold. It still surprises him sometimes, how beautiful she is. Natasha smiles, but he cannot tell what she is thinking. “Isn’t it?”

“And your inside, Natasha?” He tries to say it lightly, but they both know he is pretending. He is not an actor of her caliber. He needs her to say she fixed herself. Her whole self, not just the outside.

She is still smiling, and he can’t say what changed in her face—the curve of her lips, a muscle in the cheek, the glint in her eyes—but it looks real now. “Normally I would say something cryptic here,” she tells him, and he makes a sound that is half-sigh and half-laugh. “But you look so sad.” She leans forward to touch his face, sliding her fingertips under his jaw where the skin is rough with stubble, lifting his chin.

“There is _predstavlenie_ , crafting a persona and perfecting your performance regardless of how you feel inside, and some days that is all there is. But there is also,” her mouth twists, and she says in English, “‘fake it till you make it’.” She pauses, switches back to Russian, and says, “If your performance is good enough, sometimes you convince yourself.”

“Fixing the outside fixes the inside,” he says, trying to follow the thread.

“For me,” she says. “Sometimes.”

“So if I act like I’m fixed and normal and ‘James Buchanan Barnes,’ I will be?”

“You know I cannot answer that question, Yasha.”

He grimaces and turns away from her hand. “You’re practically a professional liar—the best liar in the world—and you can’t do this for me?”

“Such praise.” When he looks back at her, her brows are raised. Is she insulted?

“You know what I meant.”

She waves a hand dismissively. The gesture is short and sharp, one flick of the wrist. Natasha is expressive when she wants to be. Is it the result of years of acting? “Did you ever think that nobody wants you to be any of those things?”

“Steve does.”

“Is that what he said,” she says, and it is not a question, so he does not answer it. “Besides, you set yourself an impossible goal. The role is not ‘James Buchanan Barnes as he was in 1940.’ That is not how you do it.”

“Well, how do you do it, then?”

“You think ‘today I will pretend I am fine.’ Maybe you will succeed, maybe not. Then you try again tomorrow. The same role. You practice.”

“You can’t be fine all the time.”

“I never said I was.”

“It sounds exhausting, all this pretending.”

She looks at him, and it’s a hard look. Sam and Steve never look at him like that. They smile and encourage him and say things like _we all have bad days_. He needs that sometimes. But Natasha is the only one who knows. Natasha scraped herself back together from nothing. “More exhausting than the alternative?”

“What if it doesn’t work?” he says. “What if I spend my whole life pretending to feel better, and I never do?”

“I am not giving you advice. You asked me how I did it, and I told you.”

“Are you fine now?” The question comes out more accusatory than he intends. It unleashes others, lying in wait: “How can I ever know if you’re telling the truth? What if you’ve been pretending this whole time?”

“How can you ever know that about anybody?” she says, unruffled.

He huffs, conceding the point.

“Nobody is fine all the time, Yasha. Certainly not me.” She is smiling at him. He wants to believe in it, whatever it is: sympathy, happiness, affection. She is leaning toward him, unfolding her legs from in front of her and arranging herself so that she’s nearly sitting on his lap. He can feel the heat from her body. Natasha is always warm. He appreciates that about her. “But right now I am sitting next to a man I love, and we are both alive and safe and we have nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon.”

She takes his right hand in hers and he’s momentarily distracted.

“Wait, you—what did you say?” He stares at her.

“You asked me how I put myself back together. There was more than one way.” She is running her fingers over his. She looks up at him, grins, and says in English, “You want to find out if you can tell when I fake it, Barnes?”

She’s making a joke. He should make a joke in return. It’s what James Buchanan Barnes would have done, before the war. He knows that with a rare, precious certainty. But the man he is now, whether that man answers to James or Barnes or Bucky or Yakov or Yasha, that man says, “Natasha, I—,” and then can’t finish his own sentence. His heart is beating too fast. He looks at the curve of her lips, at the clean line of her jaw, and at the column of her neck. He hasn’t thought about kissing someone in a long time, but he wants to kiss her there.

To buy himself time, he says, “Aren’t you with Sam? Or Steve?” The English feels funny in his mouth. It’s like that sometimes, after a long conversation in Russian. And the question is strange enough on its own. He should have figured out the answer already, no matter how hard Natasha is to read. Steve and Sam are easy to read. But every time he thinks about the sum of all the evidence, he comes to the conclusion that all of them are sleeping together, and that is—well, he has always previously rejected it as impossible. He must have misheard or misread or misunderstood something somewhere along the line.

She lifts her head to look at him. One corner of her mouth quirks. “The way I see it, they’re with me. And each other, of course.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. He tries not to stare at her.

“We’ve all been through a lot. We know that comfort is hard to find, so we take it where we can get it. It doesn’t fix things, but it feels good, and we all need that sometimes.” She lifts her hand from his to touch his face again, cupping his cheek. “If you don’t want to, I’ll drop it. This is something you probably shouldn’t fake your way through.”

 _Breathe_. Breathe, breathe. “No, I—I want to,” he says. “But—,”

“It’s not a limited-time offer,” she says. “Any time you want.”

“Maybe we could just,” he starts, and then gives up and kisses her.

She responds easily, gracefully, to his sudden kiss. Her lips are soft against his. He feels terribly stupid, for a moment, to have forgotten how nice kissing is. They took so much from him. But she slides her tongue against his, and her mouth is sweet and lush and warm, and it is good to remember. He pulls her into his lap. She pushes her fingers into his hair, holding the sides of his face and kissing him deeply.

She nips his bottom lip and he laughs.

“What,” she says.

“Nothing,” he says. “Kiss me again.”

“You’re sure you’re alright.”

“Yeah,” he says, and the truth of it is a warm flush against his skin. “Natasha.” He smiles at her. “When we do finally get around to it, you won’t be faking anything.”

She returns his smile, then leans in close and kisses his neck right beneath his ear. She nips at his earlobe, then whispers, “Neither will you.”


End file.
